N.Y. Times shutters local news blog

After more than a year of covering fender benders, school hazing incidents and wild possums in three New Jersey towns, the New York Times has shut down its hyperlocal news blog in the state.

“The Local,” which covered Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange, began redirecting readers Thursday to Baristanet, another local news blog that agreed to pick up its coverage of the area.

The Local launched in New Jersey and Brooklyn in March 2009.

Its model relied heavily on citizen-generated content, although the Times devoted staffers to edit and manage the blogs. Tina Kelley, a veteran of the Times’ metro desk, oversaw the New Jersey blog before leaving the paper in December.

Last fall, the Times said it would sell ad space on the Local at a limited rate and would not pursue an aggressive franchising strategy.

The blogs amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year in company personnel costs, the paper said.

Diane McNulty, a Times spokeswoman, called the Local “an experiment.”

“It was a pilot, and we knew its lifespan as a Times blog with Times reporters would be limited,” she said in an e-mail. “We also knew that if we created a community around this experiment, we would have to have an exit strategy that was respectful of the online communities of users and contributors that we’d forged.”

The Local in Brooklyn will continue to be published by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. The Times was searching for a similar alternative in New Jersey, McNulty said, when it received an offer from Montclair-based Baristanet, one of the most successful hyperlocal blogs in the country.

Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal venture, had competed with the Times in the same New Jersey towns.

It continues to expand, saying earlier this year it would increase its portfolio of websites from dozens to “hundreds” by December.